DIGImend team is looking for contributors

Nikolai Kondrashov is looking for new contributors to DIGImend project, where little elves are slaving away to create Linux drivers for non-Wacom graphic tablets.

Several days ago he posted an announcement to his Google+ page stating:

You can help making non-Wacom graphics tablets work with Linux. Those sold by Genius, Trust, Monoprice, Aiptek and many others. Wacom produces great tablets and Linux supports them quite well, but for many people they're just too expensive. These include people who need a tablet only occasionally, or just want to try using one, but, most importantly, these include young people who have the talent, but can't afford the tools to develop it.

The work involves communication with users, figuring out protocols, programming drivers, testing them and sometimes even hacking on X.org input stack and GUI toolkits and applications.

Most recently the team uploaded newest kernel patches and binary builds for Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04, both 32bit and 64bit.

Unlike the linuxwacom project, DIGImend has far less human resources (see the mini-interview from April), while the amount of work to do is still quite impressive. Now that Nikolai is joining Red Hat, he's going to have even less time for programming drivers. Hence the call.

It's an interesting coincident that the company now has at least two developers involved with development of graphic tablet drivers, with Peter Hutterer being the other guy. At the same time, Nikolai's job at Red Hat isn't related to input devices.

Krita isn’t much fun without a pressure sensitive tablet. Krita uses the Qt library to provide the application interface and the tablet support. Right now, Qt only supports Wacom tablets on Linux. There is a patch that makes some tablets work, but Qt hasn’t integrated it yet. The Krita developers only have Wacom tablets, dontated to us by the community. We cannot test Krita ourselves with other tablets.”

Well everyone Qt5 axes Wacom support. Krita will be useless for graphics artists!. And therefore the Linux platform, since unlike Windows and OSX, no more professional grade tools that can rival Corel Painter!!.